A native of England, still with a home there just up the Thames from the rowing basin where his men’s eights this year won a brilliant silver for Canada at the London Olympics, Spracklen’s dismissal is the coup d’etat to several years of angst over his demanding methods and purported “divisiveness.”

The formal announcement Monday left those who love him — and their number is legion, both former athletes and present — reeling.

Many who spoke to Postmedia view the move as a repudiation of the commitment to winning, which Spracklen embodies, and a return to the dear old Canadian values best captured by the Tim Hortons minor sports programs, where participation alone is rewarded with prizes for all.

Victoria lawyer Kyle Hamilton, one of Spracklen’s multiple-gold-winning men’s eights who took the big prize in Beijing in 2008 and the only athlete representative on the Rowing Canada board of directors, resigned late Tuesday rather than keep quiet over what he calls “a horribly bad decision.”

Hamilton, now 34, said last month, as the writing on the wall became clear to him and Brian Price, the eights’ veteran coxswain, he sent out a note asking rowers to write in support of Spracklen if they were inclined.

“Within 24 hours,” Hamilton said, “we had 21 letters” from the most celebrated rowers in the country.

He said he lobbied behind the scenes much of the month “to make sure the right decision was made” — to no avail.

The decision, he said, was “a reflection of all of our needs going forward” — if Cookson said “going forward” once in the brief interview, he said it a half-dozen times — and spoke of the need for “a unified team environment.”

A 2010 review of Canada’s high-performance program, sparked at least in part by unhappiness from the pairs team of Scott Frandsen and David Calder, saw oversight of the entire men’s heavyweight side stripped from Spracklen.

The 75-year-old was left responsible officially only for the eights and anyone else who wanted to train with him at Victoria’s Elk Lake. The latter included the lightweight women’s doubles, one of whom, world champion Lindsay Jennerich, saw her national funding yanked as a result.

(That review was conducted, curiously, by a basketball coach named Ken Shields and was described by insiders who have seen parts of it as the badly done work of the typical hired gun consultant.) The Canuck men won their silver this summer though only two Beijing veterans were in the boat and despite the fact that one of their number, football player Jeremiah Brown, hadn’t even picked up an oar until 2009.

After that race, the silver swinging around his neck, coxswain Price told reporters, “If this doesn’t vindicate him (Spracklen) I don’t know what will. I have no idea what else he can do to prove he’s the best coach in the world.”

I have no idea what else he can do to prove he’s the best coach in the world.

Interviews Tuesday with Canadian rowing greats — from three-time Olympic medallist Silken Laumann, who famously won bronze in 1992 just weeks after an accident that left her right leg shattered, to Malcolm Howard of the London silver-medal winning crew, to Kevin Light, who was the spare for that crew and part of the Beijing eights, to another Beijing medallist, Jake Wetzel — painted a picture of Spracklen as a complex man who may have been difficult for Rowing Canada bureaucrats to manage but who was worth the candle.

Light, for instance, said that though there were two camps within the sport of late — the majority of whom, he said, were supportive of Spracklen — “We were coexisting quite fine this last year. I told Peter Cookson, or someone, myself that we learned to work together by not working together. I think the eights . . . (by winning silver), we showed it could be done.”

Wetzel said that when Spracklen left Canada the first time, in 1992, ’96 and 2000 were a complete disaster for the men’s program.

He has dual citizenship and left for the United States to train because Canada’s “team was crap and the coach was crap,” earning himself a reputation as a “difficult athlete. I came back (when Spracklen returned) and slotted in beautifully with Mike.

“When you’re an athlete, you always think it’s about you, that you’re the difference-maker,” Wetzel said, but Spracklen turned him into a team player.

His dismissal, he said, was a triumph of bureaucracy over the interests of athletes.

“They’re not interested in winning,” Wetzel snapped. “They’re interested in making their lives as administrators easier.”

Laumann made a similar point.

At its best, she said, Canadian rowing had “a very lean upper layer and a strong high-performance director who let coaches do what they needed to do to produce world champions and trusted they would make the decisions.

“We’ve moved away from that” in recent years, she said, “added a lot of layers.”

“They’re not interested in winning. They’re interested in making their lives as administrators easier.”

But Spracklen isn’t a man who can be controlled, she said, “and people in administration don’t like it when you speak your mind. It’s hard to manage, right?”

The notion that the successful team must speak with one voice, must be unified, is foolish, Hamilton told Postmedia.

As he said with a snort, “The British are doing very well in rowing, but I guarantee you they’re not one big happy family.”

For example, he said, a beer on the weekend might not hurt an athlete, but that’s not the question: Is it helping me win? “If it doesn’t, you don’t do it . . . He drums that into his athletes.”

He was as relentless, Hamilton said, with his superiors.

“Every decision they make, he will ask them, ‘How does that help us win?’ People have a very difficult time with that.”

But, Hamilton said, Rowing Canada’s mandate “is to win gold medals. That’s one of the great progresses for (them), even over the time I was there. It went from ‘fair play and let’s all be happy’ to ‘we’re here to win gold medals’ … How does getting rid of Mike help us win gold medals?”

Spracklen may sometimes “kick down” — meaning, he pushes his athletes — but, Hamilton said, his mistake was that he also “kicked up. There are people and coaches in this country who kiss up and kick down and Mike is not one of those guys.”

Hamilton asked rhetorically, “Could he make things easier than he has for himself? Sure, sometimes. But his belief is that if he sacrifices this principle, once, on even this smallest thing, how can the guys be sure he won’t sacrifice it again?”

Last Saturday night, Kevin Light and his wife had Spracklen and his wife Annie over for dinner. “I didn’t want to burn his steak,” Light said with a chuckle. He got the sense from him then he knew he wouldn’t be hired back. Light had him sign a poster from Beijing.

“He helps with rowing,” Light said. “But he also helps shape your personality. It’s a difficult thing to say to your parents and grandparents, yes, you shaped me, but there’s this other man, and his wife, who are a big part of who I am.”

Spracklen, who so often wrote poems about his athletes and sometimes read them aloud to them, has written his last one for Canada.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile